Istwa Nou

At the Sugar Factory Pier site on St Kitts, J. B. Walker set out to establish how Saladoid stone tools were made by making them himself. Replication is a blunt and effective method. You take the same rock, strike it the same ways, and compare what you produce against what came out of the ground. The work showed that the islanders knew their local stone in detail, which grades would hold an edge, which would shatter, and how to get a full toolkit out of a limited geology. St Kitts does not offer everything a knapper would want. The people there built what they needed anyway, and the resulting assemblage is more varied than the island's rock supply would lead anyone to expect. Skill of that order stays invisible in a museum case, where a finished adze looks like a simple object. It appears the moment a trained modern hand tries to reproduce one and discovers how many decisions went into it.

Excavation on the north coast of the Dominican Republic has turned up Saladoid occupation earlier than the accepted schedule allows. Preliminary results from A. Voss describe stable settlements whose pottery keeps clear stylistic links to the eastern Caribbean while the people making it were already adjusting to the ecology of Hispaniola, a large island with a deep interior, unlike the small volcanic islands their ancestors had crossed. The date matters because of the model it disturbs. Horticultural settlement of the Antilles is usually drawn as a chain of steps, each island taken in order from the mainland outward, with Hispaniola reached late. Early villages this far along the chain mean the spread was faster and less orderly than the steps suggest, with people crossing long distances by sea and choosing where to stop. Voyaging was a skill these communities had. The stepping stone model has always been more of a convenience for drawing maps than a claim about how anyone sailed.

On St Eustatius, a small island in the northern Lesser Antilles, A. H. Versteeg and K. Schinkel stripped broad areas of ground instead of digging the usual scatter of small test pits. What came up was a village plan. They could see where the large communal houses stood, how the ground between them was used, and which corners of the settlement were given over to particular tasks. None of that layout is visible from a hole a metre square. A test pit tells you that people lived somewhere and what they threw away; opening a whole field tells you how they arranged themselves around each other. The Golden Rock results became the reference plan for domestic architecture in the Troumassoid period, and other projects across the region changed their methods to match. The lesson is not only archaeological. Ask a small question of the ground and it returns a small answer, and the small answer then gets written up as the limit of what those people were doing.

Nevis is a volcanic cone with steep sides, and by the Troumassoid period the people farming it were reshaping those slopes on purpose. A. H. Versteeg and S. M. Wilson found that as the population grew, communities cleared more forest and built terrace systems to slow the water running off the high ground. Terracing is expensive work. It takes coordinated labour over several seasons, and it only pays if the group intends to stay and keep planting the same fields. The archaeological record registers the decision a second way, through a shift in where people lived: settlements moved inland and uphill and became more permanent. Together the two changes describe a society managing land rather than merely occupying it. The vegetation and the shape of the hillsides that Europeans found in the Lesser Antilles were in part the product of centuries of indigenous engineering. Calling that landscape natural, or wild, was a convenience for the people who wanted to claim it.